DealMaker Wants to Turn Fundraising Into Checkout

A securities offering has two stories. The first is the one a founder tells: the product, the market, the reason to believe. The second is a less romantic sequence of identity checks, subscription documents, payment rails, countersignatures and ownership records. DealMaker exists because those stories used to travel through different systems - and frequently stopped speaking to each other.

Rebecca Kacaba and Mat Goldstein knew that disconnect from the inside. Both were capital-markets lawyers. Kacaba practiced for more than a decade and co-chaired a venture technology and emerging-growth group in Toronto; Goldstein worked on Wall Street and Bay Street and later held FINRA licenses. They founded DealMaker in 2018 with an unflashy but useful instinct: regulated fundraising was not short of expertise. It was short of usable plumbing.

The company they built, legally Novation Solutions Inc. operating as DealMaker, gives issuers a branded place to run an online offering. A prospective investor can discover a campaign, enter a white-labeled portal, complete a subscription agreement, clear the appropriate checks, send money and receive updates. Behind that journey, the issuer sees the funnel - who arrived, who began, who stalled and who funded. DealMaker says companies have raised more than $2 billion through its technology.

The company owns the room

That white-label design is more consequential than it sounds. A typical crowdfunding marketplace gathers many offerings in one destination. The platform owns the audience and can present another deal one click away. DealMaker’s pages are built to look and feel like the issuer. The company controls the narrative, retains the investor data and keeps the relationship after the raise.

For a business with a genuine following, that is the appeal. The Green Bay Packers did not need a platform to invent Packers fans; they needed a system that could turn a very large fan community into a legally administered shareholder community. DealMaker digitized the NFL team’s 2021 common-stock offering. EnergyX, a lithium-technology company, later said that white labeling, data ownership and the ability to customize checkout helped drive its switch to DealMaker. Its second campaign on the platform culminated in a $75 million Regulation A round in 2024.

The strategic asset is not the campaign page. It is the investor relationship that survives after the page closes.

This makes DealMaker useful to a particular customer: a growth company, consumer brand or public issuer with a story that can travel beyond a boardroom. Regulation CF can open a smaller offering to the crowd. Regulation A can support a much larger public solicitation. Regulation D addresses private placements. DealMaker supports the workflows around all three, although the legal route, investor eligibility and services differ by offering.

A funnel with legal consequences

The product begins to look less like a portal when its pieces are laid end to end. DealMaker Marketing Services, formerly DealMaker Reach, builds offering sites, creative, video, paid-media campaigns, sponsored placements and email or SMS nurture programs. The core platform handles subscription processing, digital payments and the issuer’s view of investors. DealMaker Engage supplies CRM-style communication, documents, news and investor relations. DealMaker Shareholder Services connects an SEC-regulated transfer agent to issuance and ongoing records. An affiliated broker-dealer, DealMaker Securities, can serve eligible offerings.

The pitch is operational continuity. Every separate vendor introduces a handoff, another login and another copy of the data. When the marketing dashboard and investment table understand the same person, an issuer can distinguish an ad click from a funded investor. When the transfer-agent workflow receives the accepted investor record, ownership can appear without reconstructing the transaction from a spreadsheet. The mundane phrase “single source of truth” earns its keep here.

Automation, with a short leash

DealMaker’s 2026 releases make its direction clearer. January brought investor-feedback prompts and a mobile checkout rebuild. February added a guided four-step checkout, forecasting for marketing clients and an AI-assisted verification bot. March added automated welcome journeys, smarter filtering, funnel tracking and due-diligence visibility. April added Google sign-in, simplified accreditation and dashboards intended to put issuers and campaign strategists in the same operational view.

The verification bot is the most instructive feature. It reviews submitted documents, subscription information and screening results. When confidence is high, it can advance a qualifying investor. When documentation needs correction, it can quickly explain what to fix. But it cannot reject an investor, and sanctions matches or other high-risk cases go to a person. That boundary is sensible: use automation to shorten obvious queues, not to disguise judgment as certainty.

These features also reveal what DealMaker believes the customer is buying. It is not merely compliance software. It is time between intent and funded capital. A person who clicks an ad but cannot navigate a phone form is lost capital. So is an investor waiting days to learn that a document is blurry. A forecasting view, a reminder sequence and a verification tool may sit in different menus, but all are aimed at the same leak.

The price of owning distribution

DealMaker’s business model follows the breadth of the stack. Issuers pay software and setup fees, and may purchase marketing, broker-dealer and transfer-agent services. Public offering exhibits show combinations of monthly subscriptions, asset-creation charges, campaign retainers and service-specific fees. This is B2B software wrapped around B2B2C transactions: the company signs the contract, but the investor’s experience determines whether the system works.

That breadth creates the obvious tension. An issuer can reduce vendor sprawl, but it also places more of a consequential process with one provider. Marketing performance is not guaranteed by software. A clean checkout cannot rescue an incoherent valuation or an indifferent audience. Regulation remains regulation, even when the progress bar is attractive. DealMaker can compress and instrument the process; it cannot make every company financeable.

Its financing suggests room to keep building. CIBC Innovation Banking began supporting the company in 2022 and, with Information Venture Partners, announced a $20 million financing facility in 2025. DealMaker has also acquired Ridge Growth Agency, adding campaign expertise to the software. The company’s supplied data puts its team around 180 people; Inc places it in the 100-to-249 employee band.

A category built from overlaps

Competitors illuminate DealMaker’s unusual position. Wefunder, StartEngine and Republic are recognizable destinations for people browsing investments. Their marketplaces can supply discovery, which is valuable when an issuer arrives without distribution. DealMaker instead makes the issuer’s own brand the destination. The trade is straightforward: a company gains control over presentation and data, but must have - or pay to build - an audience capable of producing a raise.

Another set of alternatives sells only a layer. A marketing agency can acquire leads. A broker-dealer can intermediate an offering. A payment provider can move funds. Cap-table and investor-relations products can look after owners once the deal is complete. Larger issuers have always assembled such teams, coordinated by lawyers and finance staff. DealMaker’s market position is the connective tissue: one commercial relationship that reduces the number of places where the investor identity, campaign status or transaction record must be translated.

That integrated approach is especially relevant for repeat issuers. A first raise produces more than money; it creates a database of people who read the pitch, invested, declined or asked to hear more. Engage can keep that audience informed between transactions, and the marketing operation can use first-party behavior to plan another campaign. The economic argument compounds only if issuers return. A one-time portal is a project. A maintained investor community can become infrastructure.

The larger market is shifting in DealMaker’s direction. Consumer brands have learned to treat community as distribution. Founders publish directly. Customers already finance products through preorders and memberships. Inviting those people to become shareholders is a related but far more regulated act. DealMaker’s bet is that the same company should be able to own both relationships - customer and investor - without rebuilding financial infrastructure each time.

Its early legal-tech nickname was “TurboTax for securities law.” The modern company is broader and, in a way, less tidy: part SaaS vendor, part acquisition machine, part regulated-services network. Yet the original observation remains visible. Complex rules do not require a deliberately clumsy interface. If DealMaker succeeds, the paperwork stays serious while the act of completing it becomes almost ordinary.

Keep exploring

See the platform, follow its product releases, or inspect the mechanics behind an issuer account.